Department of Computer Science EXTRA INFORMATION FOR PROF. PETER BROWN

The Guide hypertext system for UNIX The Guide hypertext system was created in 1985, and developed over the next eight years. OWL, a company based in Edinburgh, extended Guide to become a successful product for PCs and Macs. Guide's main innovations were (a) buttons that expanded in-line; (b) integrating of reading documents with creating them -- the author uses the same software as the reader. Guide won the British Computer Society award for innovation. The original version of Guide, which I developed at the University of Kent, is a UNIX version, and is different in detail from the OWL products; in particular, as well as being used for production projects, it was used to explore certain research ideas in hypertext. Guide, like most hypertext systems, has since been knocked out of the water by the success of the web. A few Unix Guide documents that may be of interest are on this site. Almost all have been converted, mechanically and imperfectly, from an original troff form. the Unix Guide user manual, converted into HTML as above, but the original manual is in Postscript, and details are given of other Unix Guide materials a copy of the paper, written with Mark Russell, `Converting help systems to hypertext', Software--Practice and Experience 18,2 (Feb. 1988), pp. 163-5. a copy of the paper `Hypertext: dreams and reality', in H. Brown (Ed.) Hypermedia/hypertext and object-oriented databases, Chapman and Hall, 1991, pp. 33-54. This describes a practical Guide based tool, and its use by ICL in a production situation. a copy of the paper `Linking and searching within hypertext', EP--odd, 1, 1 (Apr. 1988), pp. 45-53. Peter Brown